I spent last week taking some time off to spend with the family in the Louisville, Kentucky area, where it was hot, sunny, and humid. If you’re ever in the area, there’s an old railroad bridge that was converted into a walking bridge and spans over the Ohio River and connects parks along the river banks of Indiana and Kentucky.
Since I’m wrapping up the rough drafts for the Phlex on Rails course, I thought a video was in order to give another overview of the Phlex on Rails course.
Course content updates
I’ve found the last few chapters have me thinking about creating Ruby gems that make it easier to integrate Phlex with Hotwire and forms, but since I know that’s a form of procrastination, I resisted the urge for now and wrote the content for how Phlex works with Rails today. Ultimately I think this is best because it’s where most people are who have purchased the course.
Hotwire
This section was surprisingly the most difficult because of the lack of documentation for Hotwire and Rails. I had to open the source code to understand how certain features work.
Forms
I’ve had a few pre-paid customers ask for more advanced form examples. That can mean a lot of things, but I agree the content that’s currently in the section doesn’t cover complex form examples. My plan to develop this content further is to start building the example Rails app for the course and start building out complex form scenarios, like bulk actions, nested forms, etc. with feedback from people who purchase the course.
All-in
After writing Turbo compositions for the Hotwire chapter, I realized there are techniques useful in Phlex for setting OpenGraph metadata, which tells social websites how to display your content when shared, SEO metadata, and other parts of pages that can be controlled via inheritance and Ruby class composition.
I wrote an article about Phlex Turbo Layouts that use methods to achieve this, but there are more powerful techniques that encapsulate concerns in Ruby classes that make it much cleaner to control metadata and other parts of pages.
Course demo app
One of my least favorite parts of teaching people something is how the examples are toy projects. For this course, I’m hoping to build a real-world app that’s deployed to a production environment that offers some sort of real utility to the world.
Here are a few ideas rolling around in my head:
- Minimal blog platform that’s optimized for developers who want to publish articles with code at LegibleType.com, which hasn’t been built yet.
- Home inventory system at Thingybase.com, which I personally use today.
- A color palette website for developers where developers and/or AI can generate color & font schemes for syntax highlighting, code editors, etc. and the site would offer up configuration files with these colors in the expected syntax. I don’t have a domain for it yet, but I’d deploy it to a public website.
- Food ordering app for parties where people can order food, like burgers and hotdogs, while you’re hanging out at the grill cooking food.
- Ruby event registration system so meetups like SFRuby can manage registrations, CFPs, and other aspects of organizing events. This would be complementary to RubyEvents.org
If you’d find any of those useful, please let me know!
Video publishing will start soon
Next week I’ll start shooting video so I can get the reps in needed to streamline my editing workflow and get feedback on the quality and format. I’ll still be drafting the outline as the demo app takes shape, but there are certain things, mainly the Phlex introduction & components that I can start recording.
Price increase from $249 to $289
As stated in the early adopter discount blurb, prices will increase to $289 when I start publishing videos and when the videos are done, there will be another price increase to $329.
The early adopter discount at $249 is one of the ways I can say “thanks” to the folks who took a chance on a course that didn’t even have an outline. Another reason to become an early adopter is if you want to give me feedback about what I should cover in the course.